#noctules

[loveisinthebat]

The Terror of the Skies

[antiqueanimals]

The New Natural History. Written by Richard Lydekker. 1901.

[loxleyed]

Murcielagos con aspecto humano aparecen en Argentina y en China.

Murcielagos con aspecto humano aparecen en Argentina y en China.

Leido en Planeta Magnifico

Unos murciélagos con aspecto realmente parecido al del ser humano, capaces de volar, reptar y nadar, han sido reportados en China y Argentina

Una especie rara de verdad con rasgos casi humanoides (ver imagenes).

Últimamente están pasando cosas verdaderamente asombrosas en el mundo, una de ellas es la aparición de estos murciélagos con aspecto ‘humano’.

Los…

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[rjzimmerman]

The largest bat in Europe, a vulnerable species, found shelter in a city park’s trees. Then they started to turn up dead.

Invasive species are sometimes cuddly and cute. In Spain, parakeets, an invasive species, are killing the indigenous bats.

A population of rose-ringed parakeets is growing as they violently displace greater noctules,the largest bat in Europe. Credit: Dailos Hernández-Brito

Excerpt:

The greater noctule is the largest bat in Europe. It is listed as “vulnerable” on the threatened species list, but for many years these winged mammals found shelter in the hollows of trees at María Luisa Park in Seville, Spain.

Then a few years ago, they started to turn up dead.

The corpses were savaged, with holes torn in their wings, scientists who study the colony discovered. Many of them were nursing pups; one corpse was a pregnant female. Two bats that managed to survive were so injured that they could not climb or fly back up to their nests. What was behind the attacks?

The culprit turned out to be another park inhabitant: beautiful, invasive rose-ringed parakeets who also make their homes in tree hollows.

When scientists first began studying the bats more than 15 years ago, they didn’t pay much attention to the birds. But now, there are thousands of them, and they are pushing the bats out of their holes, killing some, and taking over the trees where noctules once lived.

In a new paper in Royal Society Open Science, the researchers, many of them based at the Estación Biológica de Doñana in Seville, provide evidence that unless something is done about the parakeets, the park’s group of noctules, one of the largest known breeding colonies in Europe, is likely to be obliterated in the near future. The discovery also offers a real-time view of what happens when an invasive organism finds a new niche and displaces a native species.

In a cage, or its own habitat in Asia and Africa, the rose-ringed parakeet is a charming, sociable bird. Martina Carrete, a conservation biologist who is an author of the new paper, said the parakeets are believed to have first appeared in the park after about 10 of them were confiscated from a pet shop and released around 1990.